by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
The first mention of social selling social selling was in 2006, when the term Sales 2.0 was launched. I wrote in 2015 about a friend of mine that was getting a positive ROI (return on investment) on using social selling. This killed the argument that there was no ROI in social selling.
My best selling book “Social Selling – Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers” was launched in October 2016 and went into the bestseller list during the pre-order.
So why haven’t everybody embraced it?
Over my 25 year sales career, I’ve seen many changes and disruptions take place. I started selling (you may not believe this) but before the internet existed, in fact before email even existed. Why am I telling you this?
I’ve lived through multiple changes to sales and there have always been early adopters, early majority, middle majority and laggards.
My first sales role required us to write letters (as they were the main communication method). We would hand write the letters and submit to a typing pool. You have to remember this was before the PC. It took probably five years to get mainstream usage of PC and a role out of Amipro and Lotus123 on those PCs as there wasn’t mainstream usage of Microsoft Word.
While, as a graduate I had used email, this still wasn’t mainstream and it took another 5 years before email became “normal”. I have a friend that was paid to put together a business case for a company to adopt email. When he took it to the Board, the Board rejected it as it was agreed that letters would always remain the main form of communication.
The same with Social Selling, we have moved through the early adopters and early majority and are currently talking with early majority companies. All of the companies that we have transformed have understood that social (digital selling) allows greater efficiency and effectiveness as well as 30% additional revenue over legacy sales methods.
As I write, there is a cold calling conference taking place in the US. There will be always people that don’t agree, just like the people that wouldn’t accept email as a communication method over letters. Gradually those people will retire and a new generation of people will want the efficiency gains that digital provides to us.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/why-using-profile-writers-is-not-social-selling/
https://dlaignite.com/why-your-marketing-is-very-seriously-broken/
https://dlaignite.com/transforming-human-resources-the-next-step-on-our-journey/
